Streaming Services

According to Endgaget, "'Project Panther,' a company indirectly owned by Jay Z's S. Carter Enterprises, has made a bid for Aspiro, a company that runs Tidal" for 464 million Swedish crowns ($56 million) in cash. From The Verge, "Norwegian media company Schibsted, which owns a majority share in Aspiro, accepted the bid this Friday while Aspiro's board has 'unanimously recommended' that the shareholders accept the offer."

Today, Naxos and OraStream announced Classics Online HD*LL (COLHD*LL), "The first high-definition and lossless classical music streaming service that uses adaptive bit-rate streaming technology".

COLHD*LL is available worldwide, for downloads and streaming of HD- and CD-lossless quality classical music. It enables music lovers to easily access an extensive library of classical music, in high-quality audio. It is the first consumer music service to stream lossless audio higher than 16-bit/44/1kHz quality. Using patented technology, HD- and CD-audio streaming occurs without delays in buffering large (lossless) audio files.

In an interview with Billboard, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek talks about the possibility of adding a higher tiered lossless service to Spotify:

Just like we’ve had deluxe edition of albums, everyone is thinking about how does that look like in a future world? Lossless music -- is that a higher priced tier? Is that something that comes with deluxe editions? How should we package subscriptions to consumers? That’s a very big topic right now on the label side. The kind of debates that I’ve wanted to have for many, many years with the music industry, we’re finally seeing it happening. The industry is realizing, “Hey, we need to embrace streaming, and we need to do it fast.”

As reported by re/code, during the company’s earnings call last week, Warner's CEO Stephen Cooper said:

As we have said before, streaming – and particularly the subscription model – more fully captures the true demand for music. In the streaming universe, consumption drives the economics — so the more that people listen to music, the better it is for our artists and our business.

Spotify released its global 2013 consolidated financial results last week which showed revenues rising 73.6% to €746.9m ($931.7m), while its operating loss grew 16.4% to €93.1m ($116.1m). Spotify closed the year with 36m active users worldwide, with more than 8m paying subscribers. From Spotify's letter to its shareholders, "We believe that music has mass market appeal – and as such, we believe we are just at the beginning of a much larger market opportunity. We believe our model supports profitability at scale."

According to the Wall Street Journal, Sony is re-thinking "its support for free, advertiser-supported online music after U.S. pop star Taylor Swift pulled her music from Spotify, the popular digital streaming service."

Here's Kevin Kelleher, chief financial officer of Sony Music, from a Sony briefing for analysts and investors on Tuesday:

Spotify CEO Daniel Ek came out last week claiming the Spotify service was on track to pay Swift $6M over the next 12 months in fees. In response, Swift's label boss, Scott Borchetta claimed that actual US sales figures were just under $500k. So whose numbers are right?

Daniel Ek, Spotify's Co-Founder and CEO, responded to Taylor Swift today on Spotify's blog in a post titled "$2 Billion and Counting". $2 billion is, according to Ek, how much Spotify has paid out to "labels, publishers and collecting societies for distribution to songwriters and recording artists. A billion dollars from the time we started Spotify in 2008 to last year and another billion dollars since then." That's not chump change.

"But all I can say is that music is changing so quickly, and the landscape of the music industry itself is changing so quickly, that everything new, like Spotify, all feels to me a bit like a grand experiment. And I'm not willing to contribute my life's work to an experiment that I don't feel fairly compensates the writers, producers, artists, and creators of this music. And I just don't agree with perpetuating the perception that music has no value and should be free." ~ Taylor Swift

Kobalt, the leading global music publishing and music services company for artists, songwriters, labels and publishers, will tomorrow announce a milestone in the growth of streaming revenues: its writers’ European earnings from Spotify have overtaken those from iTunes.

While there's no press release or public statement to support this move, Taylor Swift's record label, Big Machine Music, has removed all of her music from the streaming service Spotify days after the release of her new album, 1989. Spotify has publicly responded on their site:

We love Taylor Swift, and our more than 40 million users love her even more – nearly 16 million of them have played her songs in the last 30 days, and she’s on over 19 million playlists.

We hope she’ll change her mind and join us in building a new music economy that works for everyone. We believe fans should be able to listen to music wherever and whenever they want, and that artists have an absolute right to be paid for their work and protected from piracy. That’s why we pay nearly 70% of our revenue back to the music community.

Streaming on PBS' Austin City Limits until 11/29/2014 is the full Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds concert which originally aired on 11/01/2014. Featuring hits old and new, from "From Her to Eternity" to "Jubilee Street" and a whole bunch of barn stormers in between, a love letter, and more, I'd say Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds still put on one helluva show.

Bluesound announced today TIDAL is now available on all Bluesound Players, giving users access to TIDAL's extensive music library in lossless 16-bit/44.1 kHz FLAC and ALAC format. Bluesound will be the first of TIDAL’s partners to fully integrate the service into its products, allowing owners to easily stream TIDAL’s library of over 25 million tracks to their HiFi music players through a home network, either via Wi-Fi or Ethernet, with simple control on any iOS or Android device. Bluesound users can sign up through the free Bluesound controller App available on all iOS and Android portable devices, or desktop version for PCs and Macs.